Stifling each noisier cry--but panting--gasping--literally half out of her mind, Arabella rushed into Darrell's study. He, unsuspecting man, calmly bending over his dull books, was startled by her apparition. Few minutes sufficed to tell him all that it concerned him to learn. Few brief questions, few passionate answers, brought him to the very worst. Who, and what, was this Mr. Hammond? Heaven of heavens! the son of William Losely--of a transported felon! Arabella exulted in a reply which gave her a moment's triumph over the rival who had filched from her such a prize. Roused from his first misery and sense of abasement in this discovery, Darrell's wrath was naturally poured, not on the fugitive child, but on the frontless woman, who, buoyed up by her own rage and sense of wrong, faced him, and did not cower. She, the faithless governess, had presented to her pupil this convict's son in another name; she owned it--she had trepanned into the snares of so vile a fortune-hunter an ignorant child: she might feign amaze--act remorse--she must have been the man's accomplice. Stung, amidst all the bewilderment of her anguish, by this charge, which, at least, she did not deserve, Arabella tore from her bosom Jasper's recent letters to herself--letters all devotion and passion--placed them before Darrell, and bade him read. Nothing thought she then of name and fame-- nothing but of her wrongs and of her woes. Compared to herself, Matilda seemed the perfidious criminal--she the injured victim. Darrell but glanced over the letters; they were signed "your loving husband." "What is this?" he exclaimed; "are you married to the man?" "Yes," cried Arabella, "in the eyes of Heaven!" To Darrell's penetration there was no mistaking the significance of those words and that look; and his wrath redoubled. Anger in him, when once roused, was terrible; he had small need of words to vent it. His eye withered, his gesture appalled. Conscious but of one burning firebrand in brain and heart--of a sense that youth, joy, and hope were for ever gone, that the world could never be the same again--Arabella left the house, her character lost, her talents useless, her very means of existence stopped. Who henceforth would take her to teach? Who henceforth place their children under her charge?